ABSTRACT
In literary hermeneutics M. M, Bakhtin's considerable influence derives in large part from his anti-Cartesian claims concerning the public nature of discourse. In his seminal essay "Speech Genres" Bakhtin argues that the most fundamental element of communicative interaction is the utterance and not the word or the sentence, and the utterance takes form only in the shape of what he calls a "speech genre". For Bakhtin, the utterance represents the most elemental unit of communicative interaction, and unlike the semantic and syntactic elements employed in most linguistic analyses, the utterance refutes what Bakhtin calls "graphic-schematic depictions". For Bakhtin, the utterance constitutes the lived social reality of language-in-use, and as language-in-use, the utterance takes the historically determinate form of the genre. A conception of genre steeped in the idea of addressivity avoids the problem of infinite regress by insisting that a genre is defined by its response to other utterances and not by its conventional formal elements.
